Marketers increasingly use online and mobile advertising to advertise their brands' offerings to potential customers. To manage the costs of advertising they typically seek to target their messages to subset cohorts of the total population with a perceived greater need for the product or service to be sold. Unfortunately, despite the ability to measure in increasing detail the number of impressions, views, and users who see a particular advertisement, the degree to which advertisers can target an advertisement to particular cohort is complicated by a number of factors that inhibit accurate targeting.
Publishers attempt to increase the value of their inventory by employing various techniques to identify characteristics about who actually consumes the content on the sites and sections of the sites they operate. Advertisers and marketers, aware of this, typically seek independent validation of publisher claims around audience demographics to ensure that they are true, since typically the more accurately a publisher identify their sites' audience demographics, the more they will charge advertisers to present an advertisement to that audience.
Marketers also like to test market reactions to products and offerings by polling them to learn their reactions and opinions to specific questions. This enables them to refine their product positioning, refine fine-tune their marketing messages, and select where best to place advertisements to elicit the greatest response. This is typically an expensive and time consuming undertaking.
To conduct an effective poll, marketers must first assemble a cohort of people that match the desired demographic. This is typically achieved by either assembling a group of people manually via phone calls, or semi-automatically from a larger group of people who have opted in earlier to provide a broad set of demographic information that matches the desired cohorts' characteristics. Neither method is cost effective, efficient, or timely.
Assembling a cohort of people to match a desired demographic from scratch every time a survey is to be run wastes the effort expended in running previous surveys. Selecting a cohort from an existing set of people who have opted in to answering surveys can result in cohorts that are too small, cohorts that are skewed, and burn out/opt out behaviors for individuals who fall into frequently sampled cohorts.
Furthermore there is no simple and easy method for publishers to make their content available for marketers to launch surveys. Current methods require additional modifications to either websites hosting the content or the applications, a process, which introduces additional costs and effort. This significantly reduces the number of sites that utilize surveying technology, results in those that do keeping the results to themselves due to the expenses involved, and hurts marketers since they are unable to access large numbers of sites in an integrated fashion to achieve the reach they need.